The world turns on supply and demand and, whether you like it or not, there’s an insatiable demand for celebrity in these times. This market force has enabled a few opportunistic (some might say genius) individuals to cash in – individuals famous for little more than being famous, it’s a perfect profitable storm for socialites who capture the zeitgeist and ride it for all it’s worth. And Kim Kardashian is only too ready to open her doors to keep those cash registers ringing.
This weekend, Kardashian is in town. Yes, the woman with 10 times more Instagram followers than Madonna is visiting the UAE and will be busy making hay while the Middle East sun shines. She’s hosting an F1 party in Abu Dhabi and will be publicising her new fragrance, Fleur Fatale, in Dubai, although it’s unlikely she’ll be dressed in the pink PVC number she wore when she was in Melbourne last week doing the same thing.
This won’t be her first visit to the UAE, because she was here in 2011 when she stayed at Atlantis, The Palm in Dubai and opened the region’s first Millions of Milkshakes outlet in Dubai Mall.
The visit had some people perplexed – many didn’t know who she was; others, fully aware of how she became famous in the first place, didn’t want her in the country at all. Why, the detractors asked, welcome someone who so blatantly flies in the face of local traditions? Still, thousands of onlookers turned up – she came, she saw, she tweeted and she made pots more cash.
Obviously she's no stranger to being on the tabloid-newspaper and gossip-magazine front pages, but her most recent hurricane of publicity has to do with, yes, her posterior. Posing in her birthday suit for the New York magazine Paper, her large "booty" was on display for all to see. Kardashian put some of the images on her Instagram feed, along with the hashtag #BreakTheInternet – and, hey presto, instant worldwide exposure, endless discussion and a substantial rising of KK stock.
Kardashian’s influence in such matters is notable. In 2013, silicone buttock implants became the fastest-growing kind of plastic surgery in the United States, with more than 11,000 operations performed.
Naturally, that’s a trend that has alarmed many people. Kardashian won’t be too perturbed, though – her improbably proportioned body has helped her amass an absolute fortune, with her income for 2013 alone reckoned to be about Dh44 million. She’s a global phenomenon, but apart from the leaked footage from a personal video, just how did the Kardashian brand become such a juggernaut?
She was born on October 21, 1980, in Los Angeles, to Robert and Kris Kardashian, the second of four siblings. Robert, an Armenian-American and responsible for his daughters’ dusky skin tones, was a defence lawyer who went on to achieve worldwide infamy when he represented O J Simpson during his murder trial in 1995. The marriage eventually dissolved and Mrs Kardashian married the gold-medal-winning Olympic athlete and television personality Bruce Jenner.
It was the televised Simpson court case that first put the Kardashian family in the media spotlight. The children, fully aware that their mother had “broken dad’s heart”, spent their time equally divided between the parents – but the case really caused a rift, because of Kris’s friendship with Simpson’s murdered wife, Nicole. “We took my dad’s side,” Kim said in a 2012 interview. “It was personal. And we thought that my dad was the smartest man in the whole world. And if he thought [Simpson] was innocent, we were going to be on that side.”
They went into court with their father and sat on the Simpson side. “My mum had gone with Bruce and she was sitting on the Brown side – on Nicole’s side. And she turned around and gave us a stare like, I don’t even want to see you guys when you get home. We wouldn’t even look her way. She was so mad.” The world saw it all.
Money was plentiful for the Kardashians; school for Kim was an all-girls, private affair, and friends were cut from a similar cloth. A rebellious streak surfaced, however, and she eloped, at the age of 19, with the R&B and hip-hop music producer Damon Thomas. They married, but, four years later, Kim divorced him, claiming emotional and sometimes physical abuse on his part.
It was in these “dark years” that she became close to her fellow socialite, Paris Hilton, at one point becoming her personal assistant. Seen at all the right parties, mingling with all the right names and playing up to the paparazzi, Kardashian fit right in. Then, in 2007, her fame and infamy were sealed when a certain videotape ended up getting worldwide notoriety. Like Hilton before her, Kardashian became a darling of the gossip magazines and websites.
She would have made it on her own, but the Kardashian brand really hit pay dirt when the entertainment cable/satellite-television channel E! commissioned a reality show about the family’s life. E! reaches about 85 per cent of American households via more than 96 million television sets – do the maths.
Just as Hilton and Nicole Richie's own E! reality show, The Simple Life, was drawing to an end in 2007, Keeping Up with the Kardashians debuted, and the whirlwind commenced. It hasn't stopped since – eight seasons of the show have been broadcast so far, with a ninth due soon. Many hundreds of millions of dollars have flooded into brand Kardashian as a result of this and several spin-off shows. Kim, as the natural standout star, has been the one to benefit most.
Hilton and Kardashian are no longer friends, which has kept the gossip flying, especially when Hilton went on the record to say she thinks Kardashian’s bottom looks “like cottage cheese stuffed in a trash bag”. Her retort? “If Paris Hilton thinks my butt looks gross, I really don’t care. At least I have a butt.”
Fans of Kardashian are lightning-quick to rush to her defence, but it's fair to say that she can stick up for herself, too, and she's well aware what her critics think of her. "When I hear people say [what are you famous for?], I want to say, what are you talking about?" she told The Guardian in 2012. "I have a hit TV show. We've shot more episodes than I Love Lucy. We've been on the air longer than The Andy Griffith Show. I mean, these are iconic shows, so it blows my mind when people say that."
After being taken to task by the interviewer, who suggested that rather than performing, she was just being followed around by cameras, she responded: “But to be able to open up your life like that and to be so … if everyone could do it, everyone would. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
When she was asked why she seems to make people incredibly angry, she was perplexed. “I have no idea why. I work really hard – I have seven appointments tomorrow before 10am. I’m constantly on the go. I have a successful clothing line. A fragrance. I mean, acting and singing aren’t the only ways to be talented. It’s a skill to get people to really like you for you, instead of a character written for you by somebody else.”
Kardashian's Armenian heritage is something that she's keen to drop into conversation, but for every quote such as "I am Armenian, so of course I am obsessed with laser-hair removal", she also gives one that highlights the struggles the tiny Armenian nation has been through, spitting venom about the Turkish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine on the anniversary of the start of the genocide the Ottomans dished out to hundreds of thousands of Armenian people.
But she’s never far from saying things like: “I hate when women wear the wrong foundation colour. It might be the worst thing on the planet when they wear their make-up too light.”
She married the basketball star Kris Humphries in 2011. The media scrum surrounding the event was preposterous, and the column inches continued when she filed for divorce just 10 weeks later, amid claims that she only went through with it all to build publicity for another season of her television show.
Kardashian is now on husband number three: the rapper Kanye West – a man seemingly as self-obsessed as she is; a one-man controversial-quote generator; a man who, when he performed in Abu Dhabi four years ago, kept his band hidden behind screens on the stage and surrounded himself with bodyguards; a man with whom Kardashian also has a daughter named North West. It’s certainly all ammunition for the haters. As are the facts that she recently published a book full of “selfies” and that she sold her recent wedding photos to the highest bidder.
The cult of celebrity gets stronger by the day and Kardashian is the undisputed queen of them all right now. The world keeps demanding and she keeps supplying – where it stops is anybody’s guess.
khackett@thenational.ae
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